20-20 Hindsight Commission

It is difficult to imagine the decibel-level of the uproar that would have been created, by our military shooting down those passenger-planes prior to their hitting the buildings. Similar to noise-levels experienced by standing in front of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building, as the truck exploded, I would say, except the same explosion repeated in every square city-block of America.

The insanity of the commission deciding that this "chaos at the top levels of government," which prevented the planes from being shot out of the sky by our own fighter-jets, was the central failure of 9/11...well, to me it's just mind-boggling.

Good grief! I had some hopes for this 9/11 commission, even when it became clear it was a witch-hunt. Those hopes are officially dashed. What a waste of time and tax-dollars!

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THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT
NY Daily News

June 21, 2004 -- It's time folks stopped calling the body headed by former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean the 9/11 Commission  and started addressing it by a substantially more appropriate name: The 20/20 Hindsight Commission.
Because the panel's latest report  suggesting that only chaos at the top levels of government prevented the 9/11 jetliner-bombs from being shot down  scales the heights of absurdist fantasy.

It's been apparent for some time now that the commission long ago was hijacked by political shills with a distinctly partisan agenda. Nothing the commission has done in its continuing headline-hunting campaign in any way contradicts the suspicion that its primary mission is to make life difficult for George W. Bush.

Truth, in other words, has taken a back seat to political posturing.

Case in point: The dramatic "revelation" at Thursday's public hearing by Gen. Ralph Eberhart that had the Air Force been notified 13 minutes earlier about what was happening on the morning of 9/11, "we could have shot down those planes."

Perhaps those planes could have been shot down before they hit their targets.

But would they have been shot down?

All anyone knew at that point was that planes had been hijacked; intercepted cockpit communications disclosed the al Qaeda terrorists telling the passengers that they had "a bomb" on board.

Not until the very last minute was it clear that the bombs they were talking about were the fuel-heavy jets themselves, and that their targets were the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Yes, Vice President Dick Cheney apparently ordered shoot-downs.

But only after the Twin Towers had collapsed and the Pentagon had been attacked  and he'd been told (incorrectly) that three more planes were headed for Washington.

Minutes later, the only plane headed for the capital crashed after passengers on board attacked the terrorists.

The notion that officials up and down the line would instantly have recognized that the hijackers planned on crashing their jets into populated targets  and then have been able to order a shoot-down that would have prevented the tragedy  borders on the bizarre.

What happened on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was not an exercise in government bumbling and miscues.

What matters now is that America sustain its response to the attack. That's the only way to prevent future 9/11s.